


Before and After

by sparxwrites



Series: Lifelines [3]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Aftermath, Altered Mental States, Angst, Explosions, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Breakdown, Voltz AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-14 09:32:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2186628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s over. It’s finished. </p><p>Xephos sits loose-limbed and pale in the dirt some distance away from what remains of Sipsco's base, trying to get his hands to stop shaking. In the distance he can see Lalna, dipping around wildly through the air in stuttering swoops and whooping his excitement at the newfound power. Ridgedog’s a tiny figure hovering atop a distant hill, watching the airborne scientist intently.</p><p> <i>I can’t stay connected long enough to fix this. Lalna, I need help. Antimatter explosives as fast as you please. This will eat the world.</i> </p><p>His hands won’t stop shaking.</p><p>(How Xephos deals - or, more appropriately, doesn't deal - with his temporary ascension to godhood, and what happens in the aftermath of the wormhole incident.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before and After

It’s over. It’s finished.

Xephos sits loose-limbed and pale in the dirt some distance away from what remains of Sipsco's base, trying to get his hands to stop shaking. In the distance he can see Lalna, dipping around wildly through the air in stuttering swoops and whooping his excitement at the newfound power. Ridgedog’s a tiny figure hovering atop a distant hill, watching the airborne scientist intently.

He’s not close enough to be able to see Ridge’s expression, but he suspects it’s one of vague pride – a mother bird watching her offspring take its first flight. As he watches, Ridgedog raises a hand, waves at Lalna and gestures to the gaping, glowing crater left by the bomb. His words are snatched away by the wind and intervening distance.

_I can’t stay connected long enough to fix this. Lalna, I need help. Antimatter explosives as fast as you please. This will eat the world._

His hands won’t stop shaking.

“You okay there?” says a voice by his shoulder, and Xephos flinches, turns his head to see Honeydew looking shaken and scratched by debris but still very much alive. Something tight in his chest relaxes at the sight of his companion, reassuringly solid and… if not human, then at least mortal.

He tries to smile, feels the muscles in his cheeks twitch and fail to create anything other than a mildly terrified grimace. “I’m- fine, friend,” he lies, curls his fingers into fists and winces when even that fails to stop the shaking.

_This will eat the world._

(He remembers the fear, stepping outside the base to hear the distant, roaring scream of- _whatever_ it was Sips and Sjin had set off and wondering if this was it, if this was the end of the world. Again. Remembers the strange sensation of Ridgedog’s voice _in his ear_ without Ridge actually being there, flinching at the phantom sensation of a hand in his chest, and then-)

(Then there had been light, a sensation of _widening_ , of everything opening and unfolding and his mind stretching thin over the whole of the landscape, and _pain_. Pain as every inch of his body, every nerve cell and neurone screamed against more power and knowledge and _awareness_ than they were ever meant to deal with, and then the world had _shifted_ -)

“Y’don’t look very fine,” says Honeydew tentatively, reaches out a hand to rest on Xephos’ shoulder and sighs when he feels the shudders still running through his friend. “Y’don’t _feel_ very fine.”

“I-” Xephos exhales slowly, jaggedly, scrubs a hand across his face and squeezes his eyes shut as he tries to pull himself together. It’s hard to form words, to even form _thoughts_ , with the echoes of razor-edged light rocketing around in his skull.

He takes a deep breath, tries again. “Ridgedog did. Something. To me. Because he couldn’t fix the- wormhole.” He licks his lips, runs a hand across his face again, tries to form the feeling of not just knowing everything but _being_ everything into words. Fails. “It was- a lot, friend. An awful lot.”

 _A lot_ seems to just about cover it.

Honeydew frowns, leaves one hand anchored on Xephos’ shoulder like he’s scared his friend is going to float away without it, scratches thoughtfully at his beard. “You did just disappear,” he says. “Like- gone.”

He doesn’t mention the way Xephos had crumpled for the split-second before he’d winked out of existence, the way his knees had given way and the dim blue glow of his eyes had lit up a brilliant, dirty white that had flooded across the grass around him.

The memory of it nearly makes him shiver, but he doesn’t, for Xephos’ sake. Instead, he struggles for something to say – words have never been his strong point, nor science, nor magic, and he suspects whatever happened to Xephos was so far beyond either science or magic that knowledge of them wouldn’t help anyway.

“Always thought Ridgedog was a shifty piece of work,” he offers, hesitantly, feels a little less tense when Xephos manages a slightly choked laugh. “Never trust a man who’s always smiling like that, that’s what I say.”

Xephos bites down on the correction that he’s really, really not sure Ridgedog is a man. Or even anything _close_ to a man. He’d always known that Ridgedog did things that shouldn’t be possible, had ways and means beyond the normal – had always tried to forget and ignore it for the sake of a peaceful mind. After _this_ , the light and the power still wailing echoes through his skull, he doesn’t think he can.

 _I can’t stay connected long enough to fix this_.

(He remembers the world reforming around him, remembers Ridgedog’s hand heavy and then light and then heavy again on his shoulder as he flickered in and out of existence. He’d looked like he was _blurring_ , melting, washed out by some invisible rain. Xephos was vaguely aware that he was speaking, communicating with the others on some kind of level, saying _something_ about the raging, screaming hell all around him – some tiny part of his brain that wasn’t occupied already with the screaming hell _inside_ him.)

(Ridgedog had smiled at him, wide and strangely comforting, and he’d known what he’d had to do. He’d _known_ , and he’d done it, operating somehow on two levels as his human brain screamed and gibbered helplessly and his newly found power worked with the calm self-assurance of infallibility.)

(There’d been Lalna at some point, helping him, not with the power he had but with explosives gifted to him by Ridge, clinging to the wall in the face of the howling winds and _laughing_ as he always did. There’d been Ridgedog, wavering and flickering in the air, debris passing _through_ him like he wasn’t even there despite the lines of fierce concentration graven into his face. And then there’d been explosions – one, two, three, more? – and then the wormhole had been… not gone, exactly but elsewhere. Dealt with.)

He makes another noise, this one a little closer to a sob than a laugh, hunches over and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes – stops that at the echo of yellow-white light behind his eyelids. Behind him, Honeydew hums his concern in a low rumble, slides his hand up to rest against the back of Xephos’ neck in a welcome attempt at comfort.

The warm, solid, _mortal_ contact is surprisingly grounding, and for a long moment Xephos just _breathes_.

To his left, out the corner of his eye, he can see Sips and Sjin, huddled together on the peak of a hill and clutching at each other like they’re scared something’s going to tear them apart. He should be angry with them, _furious_ for nearly destroying everything with their childish carelessness, but it’s difficult when he can see the way Sips is just barely managing to hold Sjin up, the way they’re both filthy with blood and dust, sporting steadily blooming bruises.

As he watches, Sjin collapses entirely, body shaking with faint, hysterical laughter that carries over to where he and Honeydew are. Sips drops to his knees next to his partner, grabs Sjin’s shoulders and shakes him, says something low and intent. The look of desperate fear on his face as he tries to hold Sjin – hysterical and fracturing and bleeding onto the grass in crimson droplets – together with just his bare hands is enough to wipe away the majority of Xephos’ resentment.

They had no idea what they were doing, children playing with fireworks for the hell of it without any idea there was an atomic bomb hidden in the mix. They’ve suffered enough.

His attention is wrenched away as, somewhere in the distance, Lalna yells with what might be delight or fear – it’s a little hard to tell with Lalna, sometimes, what with the multitude of wires that seem to be crossed in fairly important areas of his brain. For a heart-stopping second, he drops several meters straight down through the air, flailing wildly. Then he rights himself, sends off a missile from the portable launcher Ridge seems to have given him with another whoop.

It explodes, and brown-green spreads across the ravaged and cleaved-open landscape, re-carpeting the raw rock that had been exposed. At least they can fix this, thinks Xephos. At least they can heal over the scars, the physical scars, fix the world around them.

_It’s in unloaded chunks. We’re safe for now._

He’s still not sure what unloaded chunks are, the razor-edged light having taken its knowledge with it when it left, but… _for now_. He’s not sure he feels particularly safe, if it’s only _for now_.

(Ridgedog had flickered in to existence, out of existence, and then finally back in again, his customary gap-toothed smile replacing the frown he’d worn earlier. He’d looked tired, though, dark circles carved under his eyes and his shoulders rounded like he was carrying a heavy weight. The world had warped around him again, twisting and bending to the slicing pressure of that dirty light, and then it had- gone, drained away out of him and _through_ him as he stood gasping on the grass in the sunlight and air.)

(He’d used the last of the fading power to banish the antimatter explosives he’d been holding, send them back to whatever nowhere he’d pulled them from. The thought of holding anything with that level of destructive capability, with the still fresh and smoking crater in front of him, made him feel sick.)

(They’d left as the last of the power had, and then his legs had given out. He hadn’t tried to stop them as they dropped him to the ground.)

He curls his still-shaking hands into fists again, closes his eyes and sees the blue glow of the insides of his eyelids written over by the yellow-white light of godhood, and feels a little sick. Somewhere in the distance, Lalna shouts some kind of victory cry, another explosion rocking the world so soon after the last one.

Sips yells something in the aftermath, sounding outraged and offended, and Lalna just laughs and _laughs_. “That wasn’t me,” calls Ridgedog, and he’s laughing, too. As if the world hadn’t nearly ended, as if Sjin isn’t still hysterical and shaking face-down in the grass, as if Xephos’ mind doesn’t feel torn open and laid out for everyone to see.

Unable to hold back the shudder that ripples through him, Xephos refuses to look as the next explosion echoes across the hills. Honeydew’s fingers tighten briefly against his skin at the imagined echoes of screaming void being unleashed that ring in both their ears.

They might be able to fix the world, but he’s rather more worried if they can fix whatever it is that’s been left behind in his head.

**Author's Note:**

> (sort of a filler between the previous fic and the one that's going to come next, because i started writing the next one and was like "wait, there's a few bits in here that would make more sense if i wrote out my headcanons for the explosion". so yeah. artistic license was taken with several bits of this versus the actual episode for the sake of drama, and i promise that next fic we'll be back to creepy gore stuff.)


End file.
